


the moment of purpose

by poppyseedheart



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Character Study, Intricate Rituals, M/M, Masculinity, Spoilers through episode 44, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-22 09:27:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17057165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poppyseedheart/pseuds/poppyseedheart
Summary: Caleb remembers the visceral collision of his palm with Fjord’s, their blood commingling in the seawater, their hands gripping each other, the calluses on Fjord’s skin, the hum that threatened Caleb’s composure, the feeling that he had lost his leverage the second they made the deal. Suddenly, all Caleb wanted was to savor the moment of touch, but more than that the moment ofpurpose, how their blood lit up the room, a magic more sacred than memory, a feeling that could tempt Caleb to blasphemy.Trust is a transaction, Caleb writes again, painstakingly, so he doesn’t forget.





	the moment of purpose

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jamesbonds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jamesbonds/gifts).



> The working title of this fic was "blood pact: made; intricate rituals: created; i am forcibly removed from the diver's grave", so memes on memes, but the point remains. That blood pact scene was a LOT so of course it turned into this character study.
> 
> Love to Kassie for the encouragement and for catching several of my nonsense typos.
> 
> Happiest of candlenights to you Brenna, I hope you enjoy this <3

The line on Caleb’s palm heals into a thin white scar after Caduceus rests a gentle hand on his wrist and wills away the wound. Their boat, still a shambles, staggers its way out of the storm, and Caleb retreats to his quarters to write.

Up above, somewhere near the base of the main mast, Fjord decides their next destination, and all of them trust him with it. This has become routine: the act of putting his future into someone else’s hands. Caleb tells himself that he allows it only because he can go back and change it if necessary, but the notion rings false, nudges at him in all the wrong ways. 

_Trust is not simple_ , Caleb writes next to his detailed notes about the exchanging of promises, _but it can be transactional, and that is nearly the same thing._

A thrill dashes up Caleb’s spine as he recounts the ritual to the journal he keeps tucked away under his arm. He lays the scene out first—the carvings in the walls, the throne of rock, the heady absence where Dashilla had fought them and then darted away like a prey animal when the tides turned on her. He cannot help but remember his proximity to the others, the lightning that sparked in his stomach when he noticed the faint glow of the runes and their reaction to his blood. Fjord’s bright curiosity was a lighthouse that drew Caleb in so quickly it dizzied him.

“I will need your help,” Caleb had said, grasping desperately for leverage. “Can I count on you to return the favor?”

“Always,” Fjord had answered.

In his journal, in neat, blocky script, Caleb writes _Trust goes both ways. You can wield it like a weapon if you are careful._ It is a lesson he learned young, and not one he plans to forget.

Caleb takes a moment to trace the line on his palm. It spans from the base of his thumb to his pinky finger, clean, straight. Professional, some might say, though Caleb himself tries not to think in those terms when he can avoid it.

In that moment, Nott pokes her head into the cabin he shares with her. “Caleb?” Her shrill voice fills the room effortlessly.

“Hi,” he says, looking up and blinking his way back into the present. “What is it?”

She walks over to the desk and jumps up to sit atop it, right next to his journal. Her round eyes bore into him, just this side of too-intense, a look so distinctly _Nott_ it sparks fondness in Caleb’s chest. “Oh, nothing,” she says, even as she gives him an obvious once-over, finishing with his hand, which is still palm-up at his side. “I was bored.”

He smiles, small and crooked. “You are an incorrigible liar.”

Whatever she was looking for, she appears to have found it in his smile. “Want to help me hide buttons in Fjord’s pillowcase?”

“Maybe later,” he says, firm but yielding. He finds himself growing soft for her in a way he had never afforded anyone before meeting this sneaky goblin girl. It has cropped up again and again in his time with the group, too, apparent in the way he offers Jester advice or loans Frumpkin out to Beauregard. He has not yet figured out what to do with this gentle streak he’s developing, especially knowing how quickly he would betray any of them should the need arise. Or, at least, how quickly he assumes he would betray them. The thing about evil is that it is so much easier in the abstract.

Nott agrees easily. “I’ll come back in an hour.”

“Make it two, ja?”

She peers at him suspiciously, but abandons the search in just a few moments. “Okay. Have fun with your books.” She says the word _books_ like it is in a foreign language, amusingly enough. Nott is a theater of conflict sometimes, dismissive of her own intellect, willing to turn on people for the sake of loyalty, fighting a war within herself the likes of which Caleb worries he might recognize when her expression catches the light in just the right way.

“I will.”

She scampers off, hood falling back over her head as she goes, and Caleb sits back in his chair and picks up his quill. There is still so much to record.

The next part, however, gives him pause.

It’s not that his memory fails, because it doesn’t, and it won’t. He’s made sure of that, has been so careful to hold onto every detail. If he’s going to go back, he has to be exact, precise, like a surgeon with a scalpel or a cleric with careful timing, the kind of triage that comes with practice, not reading, and so Caleb remembers, and remembers—

—and remembers the visceral collision of his palm with Fjord’s, their blood commingling in the seawater, their hands gripping each other, the calluses on Fjord’s skin, the hum that threatened Caleb’s composure, the feeling that he had lost his leverage the second they made the deal because suddenly all Caleb wanted was to savor the moment of touch, but more than that the moment of _purpose_ , how their blood lit up the room, and it was them making it happen, the two of them, nobody else, a magic more sacred than memory, a feeling that could tempt Caleb to blasphemy.

 _Trust is a transaction_ , Caleb writes again, painstakingly, so he doesn’t forget.

The words stare up at him accusingly from the page, his own handwriting swimming into a sneer. 

Caleb keeps writing, documenting every detail of their ascent all the way through to the storm that sent them fleeing, and loses himself in the meticulous recounting for the next two hours while the ship rocks beneath his feet.

/

When he was fourteen years old, Caleb was as awkward as a summer day was long. He stuttered over simple sentences, shied away from attention, and preferred the company of books to people...with just two exceptions.

When Caleb was with Astrid, he smiled easier and let her rest her head on his shoulder after a long day of classes, or wear his coat during the winter when she needed to do some spellwork practice with magic Caleb didn’t quite grasp. Astrid held his hand under the desk on days when Master Ikithon was particularly demanding and harsh, and once, memorably, cut his hair in the lavatory with a knife she had taken from what they would later learn was a torture chamber beneath Ikithon’s home. At the time, before the moment was sullied as all moments from that time eventually were, all Caleb could focus on was her soft eyes on him, the way the back of her hand brushed his cheek every now and again.

It was a different story with Eodwulf.

Caleb poked at him. Stole a bite of his food at lunch or slammed their shoulders together as they passed in the hallway, always provoking, reaching. Sometimes, they would do spellwork together, and that was always Caleb’s favorite. Their hands twined together, voices twisting in the cold air. The hairs on Caleb’s forearm raising slowly.

 _I dare you to kiss me_ , Caleb remembers wanting to tell Eodwulf stupidly, foolishly, desperately, on one of the nights where the three of them were up late with only the darkness of night to keep them company.

But Caleb said nothing, and engineered and dismissed ten different plans for the next morning until, during one of their exams, they were asked to spar hand-to-hand, something none of the three of them were particularly good at. Caleb gave as good as he had, and pretended to feel disappointed when he ended up flat on his back, Eodwulf pinning his wrists to the training mat. “Get off,” he said, swearing and trying to get free, but the flush rose in his cheeks easy as anything.

Eodwulf laughed and got to his feet, reaching down to help Caleb up, too. Maybe that had been a dare, in its own way. Maybe Caleb had been dared and daring his whole life, never quite knowing how to ride the line or enjoy anything for what it was.

What it was, back then, was all manner of evil and weakness anyway. No matter that Caleb sometimes, after a long day, locked himself in a room and thought about someone else’s skin, touch, the co-dependence Ikithon was working so hard to beat out of them… 

It was a bitter winter, like every winter in the empire, and Caleb found solace in his magic and said nothing of hand-holding or his wobbly heart.

/

When Caleb was nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, he recoiled from every touch, friendly or otherwise. He lost broad strokes of time—days, weeks, even months—restrained and alone because he refused to let anyone near him. He was confused, frightened. _Young_ , though he didn’t always feel it. The asylum and its sterile walls pressed at him incessantly, inexorably, and Caleb needed space to breathe.

Whether he got it or not was a lost cause, but that did not change the fact that when his memories were restored, and that woman had laid her palms on his face, kind eyes meeting his, lips parted in a soft smile, he wept like a child through the whole encounter.

/

When Caleb was thirty-one, he met a whirlwind. Molly was an inescapable presence during the short time Caleb knew him, and inescapable for a while after, too. He had a way about him that demanded acceptance, even fondness, despite his grating laugh and innate selfishness. 

And he touched Caleb all the time.

An arm slung around his shoulder, a pat on the cheek, a full-body press against a grimy cave wall, a kiss on the forehead—it spun Caleb in so many directions he could barely keep up.

He tried talking about it with Beauregard, once. “Molly is a bit,” he’d started, hesitant, “forward, don’t you think?”

“Huh?” asked Beau, around the chicken in her mouth.

Caleb sighed. “I just mean that he does not, erm, always respect boundaries.”

Beau snorted in response, swallowing her food before patting Caleb patronizingly on the shoulder. He did not flinch from it. “He doesn’t give a fuck about anyone but himself, man. Not in a bad way, always, but the guy’s kinda weird.”

“He is an impossibility,” said Caleb, though he knew it was not technically true.

“Whatever. If it’s seriously bugging you that much just tell him to fuck off. That’s what I did.”

Caleb nodded a bit, unconvinced, and continued eating his dinner.

That night, he stood outside of the room Fjord and Molly shared, one hand raised to knock, and thought about the jangle of jewelry that announced Molly’s presence everywhere he went as if he was the kind of person that ever needed announcing, thought _it’s fine if you skim something from the top, but at least be clever about it_ , and the heat of Molly’s body in that moment, and the embarrassing blush in Caleb’s cheeks, thought all of the reasons he had to leave the group and all the ones he had to stay.

He stood there for another moment before lowering his hand and walking away. Telling Molly to slow his roll would have to come another day.

Until another day became the last day, which came with the deep unfairness that none of them had even seen it coming, and then they were burying a body and Mollymauk would not poke Caleb’s side or socially pin him to walls ever again.

/

A hand lands firmly on his shoulder, and Caleb jolts, spinning around to find Fjord looking down at him. “Easy,” says Fjord, “I was just checking on you.”

“Oh,” says Caleb. “Um, yes?”

There’s a strange tilt to Fjord’s smile as he pulls away. “Looks intense. I can leave you to it, if you’d rather be alone.”

Beneath the last line, Caleb had written _The truth is variable, and softens for no one_.

“How is it up top?” he asks, instead of answering the implied question.

Fjord shrugs. “Fine. We’re almost clear of the storm. Most people came back below, actually, to heal up and stuff.” He pauses looks at Caleb with a critical eye. “How’re you, by the way?”

“Fine,” echoes Caleb. His pulse still swims in his ears and his entire body is throbbing like a bruise, but his mind is sharp enough to write, and that’s all he really needs. Still, he allows, “Some sleep will do me good, I think. How are you?”

Fjord’s eyes narrow at the subject change, but he says nothing about it. “I’m good. Jester healed me up, had a little juice left I guess.”

“She is fond of you.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

Caleb nods, hums an acknowledgement. The reckless, impulsive part of his brain wants to ask _Do you remember our pact, how you promised to help me, the way it felt to be so fully committed to something terrifying? I have not taken a leap of faith in so long. I have not sworn myself to something destructive since the first time it ruined me, but for you, for you—_

He shakes his head a bit, furrows his brow. “Would you send someone to fetch me for dinner when it’s ready? I want to finish this, just quickly.”

“Uh, sure,” says Fjord, thrown again, polite enough not to mention it again. He takes it for the dismissal it is, and recovers impressively. “Good luck with your...your thing. I’ll get Nott or someone to come grab you in a bit.”

“Thank you.”

Fjord reaches a hand out like he wants to clap Caleb’s shoulder again, but pulls it back at the last moment. With one last parting glance, he steps out of the quarters and begins ascending the stairs back up to the deck where his crew awaits.

Between one heavy footfall and the next, Caleb writes _A pact is a promise is a premeditated heartbreak_ and shuts the book with a thud, embarrassed and anxious, reaching for something that won’t— quite—

—reach back.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on twitter @poppyseedheart or tumblr @empire-kids


End file.
